Waste away: Nuclear power’s eternal problem

Nuclear waste stored at the Asse II salt cavern is threatened by water leaking into the mine

(Image: Helmholtz Zentrum Muenchen/Dapd)

Bin it, sink it, bury it – we still don’t know what to do with our radioactive waste. Is Finland offering an answer with the world’s first deep repository?

BENEATH a patchwork of green fields and beech forests not far from the city of Brunswick, Germany, lies an environmental time bomb. Known as Asse II, it is an abandoned salt mine used as a makeshift store for hundreds of thousands of drums of radioactive waste, dumped there during the 1960s and 70s. In 1988, groundwater began seeping through the walls of the mine as many had feared, threatening disaster.

Since then, a fractious debate has raged over how best to deal with the mine’s contents. Each week, hundreds of litres of brine entering the chambers are collected and stored with the drums of waste, and the mine’s structure is becoming unstable. So a decision had to be made&colon; should engineers backfill the chambers, abandon the mine and leave the waste there in perpetuity, or should they remove it all? Both options are risky. Removing the waste will be complex, take decades and expose workers to radioactivity. If the waste stays and the mine eventually floods, groundwater may become contaminated, potentially exposing those living nearby to deadly radioactive particles.

Asse II is both a cautionary tale and a microcosm of the global debate on how to safely dispose of spent nuclear fuel. Most experts say that the best way is to bury radioactive waste deep underground in rock vaults, where it ...

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